Earlier in the week, when I was writing about my non-fiction book, Genesis and the Thoughtful Christian, I wrote about six potential challenges inherent in trying to bring faith and science together. This is the seventh:
Challenge #7: Science is dispassionate about results (ideally, at least), but religion demands dedication to doctrine.
The title of the chapter in which I discussed this challenge is “Science and the Bible: Tying a Rocket to a Cathedral.” What would happen if you tied a rocket to a cathedral? If you didn’t break your tether, you’d either pull down the cathedral or wreck the rocket. Cathedrals are designed to stay in one place, and rockets are made to move. Neither one can do what it’s supposed to do if you bind them together too tightly. I could make that same argument for the Bible and science. Trying too hard to force-fit the Bible to science or science to the Bible fails to do justice to what each of them was meant to do. (Note: That’s actually a rocket engine testing platform instead of a rocket. I took both pictures on trips to New Orleans. The platform is at Nasa’s Stennis Space Center and the Jackson Cathedral is in the New Orleans French Quarter.)
How far should Christians go in adapting their understanding of the Bible to the discoveries of modern science? Issues like the age of the earth, the literalness of the six-day creation narrative, and questions about human evolution have led to some major battles inside of the church as well as outside of it.
Groups like Answers in Genesis are dedicated to a literal treatment of the Genesis creation narrative and a 6,000-year-old universe. Science, by itself, doesn’t give you that, and they end up having to invoke additional miracles to plug the holes. Telescopes can detect objects so far away that it would take light from those objects millions of years to reach the earth. In a recent film, one of their spokesmen suggested that God miraculously accelerated the speed of light to light up the universe. Some Christians I know believe faithfulness to God’s word demands this kind of thought process, but it makes others grit their teeth in frustration because it seems like cheating. Can’t the evidence stand on its own?
The Biologos group is made up of Christians who accept the theory of evolution and believe it was the method God used to create the variety lifeforms we have on earth. Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project and the author of The Language of God, is a member of this group. Their approach calls for a more symbolic reading of the Genesis narrative, but that does not mean they treat the entire Bible as symbolic or that they don’t believe in miracles. They would probably say the imagery in the Adam and Eve story is more like the prophetic language of the book of Revelation than the concrete imagery of the gospels. God chose not to burden the original audience with technical language about DNA helixes and singularities and concentrated on the theological side of the story. There is much to appreciate about this group, but many Christians are understandably wary of anything bearing the label “evolution.”
Hugh Ross’s Reasons to Believe group splits the difference between the two groups. They believe in an old earth, but do not believe life could have developed without the miraculous intervention of God at certain points along the way. They believe in a literal Adam but do not believe he was the first manlike creature to walk on two feet. (They use the term bipedal primates.)
Tim Stafford’s The Adam Quest is a good sample of the various views. In it, Stafford interviews eleven scientists from across the young earth/old earth/evolutionary spectrum. I strongly recommend it if you want to get a sense of the options and of the hearts of the people behind them. If you’re a Christian in the sciences, you would relate to the struggles of the people Stafford interviews.
One criticism I’ll note here is that many of the more vocal creationist groups are heavy with scientists and engineers but lacking in experts in the Bible, Christian theology, Near Eastern literature, and archaeology. I tried to address that concern in my book by including plenty of material from Bible scholars and theologians, and I advise you to keep it that in mind as you explore your options.
It might surprise modern readers to learn that the questions surrounding the book of Genesis didn’t start with Darwin. St. Augustine wrote Literal Commentary on Genesis around 1600 years ago. This is the advice he gave to his readers:
…different interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we, too, fall with it.
(Quoted in: Randy Moore, Mark Decker, and Sehoya Cotner, Chronology of the Evolution-Creation Controversy, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2010, 7.)
I think Augustine’s admonition is one we would do well to keep in mind today. We have the Bible, we have science, and we have our ideas about how biblical truth and scientific data might go together, but they are just that: our ideas. If my belief in the Bible depended entirely on my ability to reconcile Noah’s flood to geology or to explain how the Adam and Eve story relates to homo erectus bones or to Neanderthal DNA in my European genome, my faith would be in jeopardy. There are no easy answers to some questions. The fact that the universe exists at all and that humans have intelligence, consciousness, and morality would be better places to start an intellectual faith quest. Investigating the evidence surrounding the resurrection of Christ would not be a bad place to start either. As many have discovered, however, intellectual faith quests have a way of turning into experiential faith quests.
When it comes to the issues I’ve written about, I think there is a point where Christians have to let science be science and let the Bible be the Bible. Appreciate what each has to offer and learn to live with a certain amount of tension.
Later in his career, C.S. Lewis wrote to a friend that he found intellectual argumentation to be too exhausting, and I can sympathize. Many of the laypeople I meet in church want simple answers, but those kinds of answers don’t fly on the university campus. I have sometimes found that the more I try to address the questions of one crowd, the more I lose the other. C.S. Lewis found that fictional stories offer something to both crowds. They’re simple on the surface, but they can also address serious questions in colorful ways. He spent the next few years writing the children’s fantasies that introduce many of us to his work. One of my books, The Sign of the Sword, is a product of my exposure to Lewis’s fiction works, and I’ll tell you about it next week. I wrote the first draft when I was nineteen, and I still love this book. 